Logic, Reasoning, and Worship
It’s important that we have not only good reasoning, but sound logic. Christians are often accused, and sometimes correctly, of being brain-drained folks who, at times, don’t even know why they believe what they believe. When that’s true, it limits our ability to influence people, and leads to a populace that is increasingly one of darkness.
Logic is the fundamental rules that we apply to reasoning to “reason from A to B.” It’s the fundamental parameters that we apply to working through a problem. But if our logic is flawed, our reasoning will never bring us to the correct answer, no matter how good the reasoning seems. Simply put, reasoning is a system, and logic is the rules applied to that system.
Flawed logic means that the answer is never right, even if the reasoning is 100% (internally) consistent. Basically, it’s possible to have something make perfect sense, but to be totally wrong. Let me show an example:
- 1.) All cars are Hondas. (Basic rule.)
- 2.) This is a car. (True premise, but actually it’s a Chevy in this case.)
- 3.) Therefore this is a Honda. (False conclusion.)
Even brilliant minds can make basic errors in logic. For example, Stephen Hawking said, “Because there is a law of gravity, the universe can and will create itself out of nothing.” I’ll let you work out the errors in that.
An error that my Christian heritage makes goes like this:
- 1.) God said to worship in spirit and truth. (Basic rule.)
- 2.) God said to avoid vain worship. (True premise, but in this case, the word for worship is not the same as the premise, and is never used in a similar manner, making them non-comparable/parallel.)
- 3.) Therefore we must perform a certain set of acts every Sunday to please God. (False conclusion and non sequitur.)
While the errors in the makeup above are far more extensive than I’ll spend time with here, it’s important for us to spend time making certain that our beliefs have good logic and reasoning.
With Christian love, always,
—Luke